Around the World

Last week, China’s second Linear Collider Workshop was held in Beijing to discuss how China can join in the pre-research and future construction of ILC project more constructively. A unanimous consensus was reached that China should play an active role in ILC international cooperation and key-technology R&D on accelerator and detectors should be further pushed ahead.

Feature

Alongside a story on muons—the short-lived cousins of the electron— symmetry magazine in its June 2012 issue features a silent movie about the Standard Model of Particle Physics. See quarks dancing, the Higgs entering the scene and get your own answer to the question mark at the end!

Director's Corner

The international KILC12 workshop was held in April in Korea to discuss topics varying from ILC physics to the nuts and bolts of the accelerator and detector designs for the International Linear Collider. This meeting came at a crucial time when the design decisions for the Technical Design Report was being finalised and the writing of the report being begun in earnest.

Image of the week

Some 100 cavity and photo enthusiasts came to DESY last Wednesday to hear Karsten Büßer talk about “Cool Runnings” and see the picture story of cavities in the making by science photographer Heiner Müller-Elsner. The exhibition will be on show at DESY for a few more weeks. Read more here.

In the News

Scientists from the MINOS experiment at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have revealed the world’s most precise measurement of a key parameter that governs the transformation of one type of neutrino to another.

CERN has adopted a new approach to knowledge transfer under the label of CERN Easy Access IP, an initiative to make it easier for businesses and entrepreneurs to access intellectual property generated at CERN in the course of its research programme.

The Large Hadron Collider is to be switched off at the end of the year to undergo a major upgrade, but scientists hope to have achieved one of the machine’s major goals by the time it does – proving the existence of the so called God Particle.